by Sally Denton and Roger Morris

LAS VEGAS—Stoic in the fierce summer heat of this singular city, its old hands are not surprised by the spectacle in Washington—the demand for personal loyalty above all, employees fearful and in conflict, the rule of impulse, a worship of wealth, the honest seen as weak, the poor as losers, threats, humiliation, swagger, lies.

The Trump regime, of course, reflects the substance as well as style of Las Vegas, a provincial outpost become an arbiter of national power.  Once thought the society’s most aberrant city, it is not just newly respectable but proves to have been an archetype all along.  Still, despite lavish public relations, an image transformed from criminal empire to corporate-polished family playground, there remains the echo of an old Vegas adage that “Nothing’s on the square but the tables.”

Washington has long had its ties to America’s gambling Mecca, congresses and presidents of both parties taking generous campaign donations from casino moguls.  In return for paying out and off, Las Vegas enjoyed all but utter immunity from any profit-threatening regulation or disturbing federal inquiries in its 70-year rise to become headquarters of a global multi-trillion dollar casino colossus.

Like other collusion with the Strip, from Wall Street to the Mormon Church, that relationship was relatively discreet, politicians keeping casino angels at a decorous distance.  Now the Strip’s oligarchs have moved from casino back room to political front row.  While most modern presidents enjoyed the patronage of Vegas titans—from John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon—they recognized such associations carried a stigma and used third parties to insulate themselves.  Nevada Senators who rose to national prominence—notably Republican Paul Laxalt and Democrat Harry Reid—were keenly aware that the city’s kingpins were an embarrassment, if not a disgrace, for the public faces that duly represented their interests in Washington.

With erstwhile casino boss Donald Trump in the White House, one of their own, the city flaunts its unprecedented power as never before.  Three of its masters, all on Forbes “billionaires list,” are proudly in Trump’s inner circle.  Sheldon Adelson, the 18^th richest person on the planet and one of the largest GOP donors in the 2016 election, was seated just behind Trump at the presidential swearing-in.  The President’s onetime casino rival, Steve Wynn, is Finance Chairman of the Republican National Committee where he leads fundraising efforts for the 2018 midterm elections.

Joining to raise the reported $107 million for the inauguration festivities, Messrs. Adelson and Wynn both sat on the Trump Inaugural Committee, along with Phil Ruffin, Trump’s 50-50 partner in a 64-story luxury hotel and condominium in Las Vegas.  Ruffin accompanied the future president to the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, an event reportedly of interest to Special Counsel Robert Mueller as well as congressional investigators looking into the origins of the Russian intervention in the 2016 election.  When the 82-year-old Ruffin married a former Miss Ukraine and super model 47 years his junior, Donald Trump was his best man.  Ruffin and the Trump Organization are also considering a new Vegas casino venture near the Strip, according to Forbes, and Ruffin says he has talked with Trump about building a high-speed train between Vegas and southern California that would zoom millions of gamblers to Sin City.

In an America so widely dominated by corporate and individual wealth, the Strip’s once disreputable ethic of exploitation, the unabashed worship of money, has become in large measure a national ethic.  President Trump personifies at once that post-modern decadence and its aegis in traditional Vegas. The quintessential gold-plated, characterless casino bully who wields power through fear and favor, his tortuous management style mimics the burly old bosses of the gambling racket, the relic creed of the city become the creed of an era.

Unique intimacy with presidential power is certain to bring Las Vegas further rewards.  What a kindred White House can do to serve the far-flung interests of the gambling industry is formidable, from influencing Foreign Corrupt Practices cases to curbing or even prohibiting online gambling as a small but widening chink in casino dominance.

As its power and profits grow, the city is destined to play a starring role, practically and symbolically, in the ongoing investigations of Trump’s financial dealings. The President’s Las Vegas investments and embroilments are bound to be part of the Russian inquiry now widely reported to be “following the money.”  To hear his casino pal Ruffin tell it, the Russian business connection is “just pure crap.”   He knows—if only because Trump, in the time-honored way of their world, would have cut him in.  “We took my airplane…Donald has no investment of any kind in Russia, nor has he borrowed any money from Russia.  If he had a business deal there, he would have asked me to go join him.”

The unfolding clash between the casino boss president and the special counsel—Mueller in Vegas parlance a “square john” who cannot be bought or bullied—will be fascinating for historians.  It is telling how much the spirit of the city hangs over an inquiry into the very money laundering and techno-manipulations that have been Vegas ways and means.  If an American President has been compromised by a foreign power, it surely goes beyond any collusion of his campaign staff to longer, deeper corruptions, to the essence of greed epitomized by our shadow capital in the desert.

Whatever the outcome of the investigations, the casino boss presidency will remain the blight it already forms in American history, and Las Vegas will go on in its inimitable power and hold over the nation left behind.

Sally Denton is the author of eight books of narrative nonfiction, including The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World, and American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857. 

Roger Morris served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. He is the author of several books on history and politics, including the acclaimed Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.

The award-winning historians co-authored The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, called “one of the most important books published in the United States in [a] half century” by the Los Angeles Times.